Some of these trends are closely linked to explicit policy aims: as the 2017 report states, “Since 2012, there has been a clear upward trend in the amounts of EU official development assistance going to CSOs to support them as governance and development actors”. This direction was set out in the EC’s 2012 Communication on CSOs and should come as no surprise. CONCORD’s reaction at the time glowed, “It is the most constructive official EU document on CSOs that we have seen in many years. We welcome in particular the fact that the document is based on a rights based approach viewing civil society as an asset for any democratic system but we would now like to see this document being translated into concrete and effective terms in the upcoming cooperation instruments and their programming and in the spaces and mechanisms of dialogue to be established at all levels (country, regional, European, global).” Welcoming the recognition of a more political role for CSOs as governance and development actors, CONCORD and its members perhaps did not count on losing their primacy of place as development implementers.
Other trends impacting on CSO access to EU funding may be due, instead, to practical concerns. The reduction of EC administrative budgets in the current MFF; new political realities focused on and nearer to Europe’s borders; the need for – and political pressure for – flexibility (at the same time as innovative modalities are being developed and tested), have all brought changes to the EC’s means of implementation. Some CSOs welcome shifts towards much larger, consolidated grants and fast-track modalities. Others consider that these technically leave out some experienced CSO partners, which in turn reflects badly on the EC–CSO partnership. The EC remains a CSO champion at a time when civil society space is shrinking in many countries, including EU members, so the perception of shutting them out of operational partnerships on technical grounds, while perhaps inadvertent, must be noted.
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